Assignments

See this Ed lesson for a hands-on LaTeX tutorial and practice. We strongly encourage you (though not required) to type the written parts up using LATEX. There are links to resources for learning LATEX on the website. If you take other classes that involve a fair amount of math (such as the machine learning class CSE 446) or plan to write research papers, you will need to typeset in LATEX anyway. You can even use LaTeX in places like Ed and Facebook Messenger! It is a very useful skill, so you may as well start now :) Many Allen School students learned to typeset in this course. And we are here to help you as you learn LATEX so don’t hesitate to reach out!

These resources may be helpful for you to get started with LaTeX, with thanks to Adam Blank:

• A homework template that you can use. Here is a preview of the rendered result.
• A How to LaTeX tutorial, including specific information on how to use the template.

Overleaf is an online editor that spares you from having to install LaTeX locally. Overleaf has some documentation, but you might want to read this how-to-overleaf document first.

For each problem, you must briefly explain/justify how you obtained your answer, as correct answers without an explanation will not receive full credit. Moreover, in the event of an incorrect answer, we can still try to give you partial credit based on the explanation you provide.

In general, your goal in an explanation is to write enough that a student from class who has attended lecture, but not thought about the problem yet, could understand your approach, verify your reasoning, and believe your answer is correct. While we do not usually need to see arithmetic, you must include enough work that in principle one could rederive your answer with only a scientific calculator.

Unless a problem states otherwise, you should leave your answer in terms of factorials, combinations, etc., for instance \(26^7\) or \(26!/7!\) or \(26 \cdot \binom{26}{7}\) are all good forms for final answers.

Example: If you are asked to compute the number of ways to permute the set \(\{1,2,3,4\}\) that start with \(1\) or \(2\), it is not enough to provide the answer \(12\). A complete approach would explain that (1) we can count separately the permutations starting with \(1\) and those starting with \(2\), and that (2) the two sets are disjoint, and hence the overall number is the sum of the numbers of permutations of each type. Then, (3) explain that there are \(3!\) permutations of each type. Finally, (4) say that the overall number totals to \(2 \cdot 3! = 12\).

Yes, but you must follow the guidelines listed in the syllabus. If you work with others (and you should!), you must still write up your solution independently and name all of your collaborators somewhere on your assignment.

You must upload a pdf of your written solutions to Gradescope under the corresponding Gradescope assignment(s). (Instructions as to wyere to upload your solutions to gradescope will be in each homework.) The use of $\LaTeX$ is highly recommended. Note that if you hand-write your solutions, you'll need to scan them. We will not grade work that we are unable to read, so please write neatly if you handwrite. Remember that you must select pages'' to identify which problem is on which page as part of your gradescope upload.